In today's wide network enterprise, security has become a major concern to prevent unauthorized access to the many computer systems of the network. Computer systems within one business site are typically connected using a Local Area Network (LAN) and a Network Administrator is responsible for keeping the network up and running properly. As local area networks (LANs) continue to proliferate, and the number of personal computers (PCs) connected to LANs continue to grow at a rapid pace, network security becomes an ever increasing problem for network administrators. As the trend of deploying distributed LANs continues, this provides multiple access points to an enterprise network. Each of these distributed access points, if not controlled, is a potential security risk to the network. Among these risks, a virus attacks strongly impacts all IT infrastructures by the very fast spreading of the virus. A specific kind of virus is the well-known ‘Worm’; one which makes use of security loopholes in operating systems and spreads from one system to another via networks through the standard TCP/IP ports 137, 139 and 445. Another risk is the volunteer attack and the unauthorized access to protected resources (also using spoofing).
Log files and other accounting mechanisms can be used to track users and their activities. Using log files and audit information is known as passive detection since these rely on a passive analysis set of data. The system administrators are responsible for reviewing the operating system security event logs to determine if a system attack or breach of security has occurred. Some known products allow administrators to review those logs, such as Tivoli Risk Manager from the Assignee and GFi LANguard S.E.L.M. from GFI Software Ltd.
Tivoli Risk Manager is based on a framework infrastructure allowing cross operating system availability (OS/2, Windows, Linux and AIX) to report the alerts on a centralized console. This solution offers the possibility for the administrator to create the appropriate relationships between various security alerts. However, the relationships concerning the Netbios invalid attempts between different operating systems are not deeply analyzed and do not relate to external databases.
GFi LANguard S.E.L.M. is a security event log monitor that collects all security events in one central database, creates reports and custom filters. This solution suffers from the limitation of operating on one Operating System only, namely Windows, thereby leaving attacks possible for others operating systems.
More generally, all existing solutions leave administrators with receiving a large number of false warning messages that compel spending a lot of time manually analyzing those messages and sorting out the non relevant violations from the true ones.
Therefore, there is a need for a solution that overcomes the aforementioned drawbacks. The present invention offers such solution.